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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

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Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Fire
Animal
Humidity
Books
Enemies
Book
Weather
People
Content
Animals
Enemy

More quotes by Paul Valery

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We are wont to condemn self-love but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
Paul Valery
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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
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History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
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Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
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Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Paul Valery
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery
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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Paul Valery
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Paul Valery
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A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.
Paul Valery
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A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
Paul Valery
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Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Paul Valery
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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery